Openstack Horizon installation with SSL on Ubuntu

Table of Contents

This is a guide on installing the Openstack Horizon dashboard on Ubuntu 12.04 or 14.04, including SSL setup. It features nice screenshots and even an Ansible playbook to automate it all. We will set up the Icehouse version of Horizon.

Openstack is one of those cloudy cloud projects. Warning, keep your buzzword bingo cards ready for the Wikipedia definition:

OpenStack is a free and open-source software cloud computing platform. It is primarily deployed as an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution. The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects that control pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center, able to be managed or provisioned through a web-based dashboard, command-line tools, or a RESTful API. It is released under the terms of the Apache License.

This tutorial does not cover a full openstack cluster setup, just the Dashboard. In this tutorial my Dashboard talks to the CloudVPS Openstack service, change this for your own Openstack installation.